Second Level Projects with Traditional Knowledge and Possible Funding Streams-Part II

Second Level Projects with Traditional Knowledge and Possible Funding Streams

By Wendy Griffin 4/30/2015

 

Besides the directly selling of Garifuna and other people’s crafts, foods, medicines, we in Honduras have also worked with the marketing and distribution of these products and books, videos, Cd’s, crafts related to them.

Promotion—Public Relations,which can include newspaper articles, academicjournals,expo-ventas (exhibitions where people can also buy what is exhibited), Wikipedia articles, Wikimedia Commons Photos, Directo contacts with professional organizations through list servers, getting recommendations of people to contact, craft exhibits at librarian and anthropology conferences.

Distribution –Developing or improving or training about ways that different distribution systems. For Garifuna things, this included the librero (book importers) system. How do librarians buy books and how do they get information on new   books and videos. How is this different for university and public librarians. How are Garifuna books, videos, CD’s  sold in the US?  How else could they be sold  like ETSY storefronts? How can these American Garifuna materials be sold in Latin America and the Caribbean like through Casa del Libro and www.libreroonline.com.  

A lot of what I do is identify funding sources for Traditional Indigenous Knowledge projects.

InterAmerican Development Bank—The African equivalent would be the African Development Bank

InterAmerican Foundation –Grass roots economic development.Maybe only in Latin America and some countries of the Caribbean.

Oxfam – I found they had almost impossible to satisfy technical requirements so most projects we wanted to do did not work with their funding.

CARE- Care generally chose not to work with Garifunas. They did do one project related to food and AIDS people.

Catholic Relief Services.. They also generally chose not to work with Garifunas. They did one or two projects through Caritas for Garifunas neither went well.

Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. They have a Global Library program with Internet service provided in the library to help learn the online marketing above. In Honduras they work through Fundación Reicken. I have not heard about good relationships of Fundacion Reicken libraries with the communities they are in. Both organizations cold to me personally.

Aid to Artisans-They work with the US gift market.

ETSY-The fee to get into marketing through ETSY is very low about $20.  They are a online marketplace with one million stores. Import stores are allowed.

American Jewish World Service-They are active in Africa too.

Edwards Foundation- The Garifunas made contact with them through AJWS.org. They had special funding for women and chidren programs. They were very helpful and were the principal funders of the Traditional Indigenous Knowledge book Los Garifunas de Honduras.

Mazon Foundation. The Jewish Response to Hunger. While 91% of their programs are in the US,they did help the Garifunas after Hurricane Mith.

Presbyterian Church (USA) They helped one year directly through the Presbyterian Hunger program, and currently say they are helping by funding Agricultural Missions, Inc. who says they are helping the Garifunas and the Lencas. A Lenca woman just won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. People who sell crafts in Cameroon who work with a Presbyterian funded program are able to sellthrough Ten Thousand Villages, a chain of stores run by the Mennonite Central Committee, a program of the Mennonite church.  Garifunas could not get their crafts accepted in this store.

Wikimedia Foundation. They do grants to train editors to write Wikipedia articles and put up Wikimedia Commons photos and work on other Wikimedia projects including Wikivoyages, Wikispecies, wikiuniversity, wikibooks, wikisources, etc.. They are active in South Africa and there is a special Wikiproject Africa. I am very excited to see the Wikiproject Africa articles about foods.  Warning there are lots of intellectual property rights issues involved with traditional knowledge up on the Internet and it is going to become worse with the Transpacific Trade Pact. Get informed.

Food products can be in the gift market like pineapple vinegar, pineapple wine, coconut candies, etc.

USAID in Honduras they are currently involved with publishing bilingual (Spanish Indian languages) story books.

UNDP paid to build a typical restaurant for Garifuna women farmers.

GROOTS- works in Africa, too.

Working directly with a specific church in the US to get small amounts of funding. We have worked with St. Andrew’s Episcopal church with our bilingual intercultural education project.

TEAR Fund of the Evangelical churches of England and The Methodist Church of New Zealand has helped the Miskito bilingual intercultural education project.

UNICEF helped us publish two bilingual (Miskito-Spanish) story books with drawings by a Miskito artist.

The following two funding streams you would have to partner with a US citizen partner.

National Endowment of the Humanities- Can do Bridging Cultures film projects or web based projects.

National Endowment of the Arts (There are also state endowments for the arts. In Pittsburgh there is a Congo African arts group Umojá).

In the past Kellogg Foundation of the US and HIVOS of Holland has helped Miskitos (Kellogg) or all Honduran Indians (HIVOS). Their funding priorities change from  year to year.